information overload?

This page explores myths about 'information overload'.

A fashionable metaphor during the 1990s was that using the web was like trying to drink from a firehose.

More broadly, critics have claimed - with more enthusiasm than substance - that people in advanced economies are suffering from 'information overload', infoglut and web addiction ... and that the overload is increasing.

Neil Postman's miserabilist Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology (New York: Knopf 1992) announced that

From millions of sources all over the globe and beyond, through every possible channel and medium - light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses - information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage - on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips -- is an even greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom. Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions, but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose ... We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

Nathan Zeldes, David Sward & Sigal Louchheim, in a 2007 paper Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer, fretted that

organizations employing knowledge workers are greatly impacted by the Infomania phenomenon, also referred to as Information Overload or Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). Infomania is the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions.

... this phenomenon places knowledge workers and managers worldwide in a chronic state of mental overload. It exacts a massive toll on employee productivity and causes significant personal harm, while organizations ultimately pay the price with extensive financial loss.

Louchheim was characterised as

an internationally recognized expert in the area of interestingness, the discovery of what is interesting (new, actionable, etc.) in large masses of data ... and is an active member of the international interestingness community.

Danny O'Brien - proponent of lifehacking - proclaimed in Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks that

Technologists consume Big-Gulp-loads of information, and write, code, and edit reams of output. Author Charlie Stross notes that he reads and digests more in his morning bookmarks than most literate 18th-century readers would process in a year. Author Charlie Stross notes that he reads and digests more in his morning bookmarks than most literate 18th-century readers would process in a year.

Richard Saul Wurman's polemical Information Anxiety (Indianapolis: QUE 2001) more modestly claimed that

A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England.

with the conclusion apparently being that the 'average person' is now compelled to read the NY Times rather than skimming text, channel-surfing broadcast media and becoming adept with the 'delete' button in managing incoming email.

Such claims are essentially ahistorical and often rather patronising, since they are predicated on a view of people as passive receptacles without choice or ability to discriminate.

A recurrent lament since the beginning of recorded history is that people - particularly literati and executives - are faced with too much information, have too little time, a too stressed. Perhaps that is part of the human condition.

Upper-class consumers in Victorian London complained that seven mail deliveries a day made life a misery. Contemporary psychologists in Boston and Vienna worried that constant telegrams were resulting in unprecedented stress. Critics in Paris and New York claimed that the proliferation of books and newspapers through new technologies (cheaper paper, easier printing) and readier access by publishers to capital was leading to nervous debility and other woes, best addressed through time in the South Seas or the Wild West. By the 1920s pundits were decrying a bombardment from the phonograph and radio, with calls to 'switch off'.

Percy Shelley, in the 1821 Defense of Poetry (here), had more provocatively commented

We have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice: we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political economy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would', like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world, and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

Herbert Simon's 1978 Rationality as Process and as Product of Thought commented that

In a world where information is relatively scarce, and where problems for decision are few and simple, information is almost always a positive good. In a world where attention is a major scarce resource, information may be an expensive luxury, for it may turn our attention from what is important to what is unimportant. We cannot afford to attend to information simply because it is there.

People in fact do not "attend to information simply because it is there": they sort, skim, filter.

The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association for example commented in 1992 that around two million biomedical articles were published each year, with the diligent (or merely deluded) reader having two options: read two articles per day (so that within a year that reader would be a mere 60 centuries behind) or read 6,000 articles each day. Researchers are not that zanily omniverous: instead they rely on print and electronic abstracting services and indexes.

In 2006 one pundit announced that there are more hours of music recorded in a single year than there are hours in that year, so that "it is literally impossible for one person to listen to everything". We are not aware of anyone who consistently tries to listen to each and every recording: people rely on reviews, recommendations and implicit filters such as the unavailability of some recordings.

Vannevar Bush had preciently commented 50 years earlier that

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers - conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is, correspondingly, superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.... The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

accordingly hailing information technology as a tool in identifying and filtering information.

Eli Noam in 2008 questioned the hyperbole, commenting that

I think that the consumers, being subjects to this flood, need help, and they know it. And so therefore they want to have publications that will be selecting along the lines of quality and credibility in order to make their lives easier. For that, people will be willing to pay.

Perspectives are offered by Mark Brosnan's Technophobia: The Psychological Impact of Information Technology (New York: Routledge 1998), Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press 1977) and David Shenk's Data Smog (New York: Harper 1997).

Discussion of info overload and cyberaddiction in the Digital Environment guide elsewhere on this site features have comments on other works such as The Age of Access: The New Culture Of Hypercapitalism Where All Of Life Is A Paid-For Experience (New York: Tarcher 2000) from dyspeptic-by-numbers Jeremy Rifkin, Theodore Roszak's The Cult Of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise On High Tech, Artificial Intelligence & The True Art Of Thinking (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1996), Heather Menzies' No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre 2005) and Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst: Prometheus 2008).

They are reflected in fashionable tracts such as Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow (London: Orion 2004) and Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle (London: Hamish Hamilton 2004) that are the heirs of Thoreau, Montaigne, Epictetus, sponger Paul Lafargue and others who advocated abandonment of the rat race or merely access to a private income.

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